Friday/Shabbat – Day 235/236
March 28, 2013
Friday was my usual morning of work and TA training and meeting in the afternoon. Wasn’t feeling so well for much of the day and ended up skipping on the Glee Club trip to Boston. Felt my health would be best served back on campus.
Shabbat dinner was something very very exciting this week. The bi-annual Levine CIS@Shabbat. The dinner for Jewish computer scientists (and Louis Petro #psaklouis). Dinner was lovely, the conversations binary and lively and I felt very much at home. I’ve been getting much closer to Ariella recently, and this was another good chance to hang out together.
Shabbat was Aviva’s birthday and as such a surprise lunch was planned. Ariel Menche, her boyfriend had come in for the weekend and we had a great time surprising her with a loud happy birthday, shortly after she awoke. Lunch went for a couple of hours, again in excellent company, though less nerdy than the night before.
The afternoon was a good ‘shluf’ (nap) before coding again till 5:30AM, when I finally got my latest project complete!
Thursday/Friday – Day 184/185
February 3, 2013
Thursday I found myself with more time than expected and even had an interesting and productive physics lecture in the morning that delved into the workings behind MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). The afternoon saw more errands (they never seem to end) before a lovely dinner at Hillel, a meeting with the dining philosophers and, a few more ‘shop hours’ building the Glee Club set.
Friday was a little nightmarish. I woke up late after my usual night of intense work and went straight to grading homework for the computer science class. The problems proved more subtle than initially assumed and as a result took us a great many hours. In face as a team of 14 TAs we were grading for more than 4 hours. This left me quite tired after the subsequent TA training and faculty meeting. Shabbat dinner was nice as the company was excellent (Ariella, Aviva, Michal to name a few) and I had a proud moment of remembering a ‘mishna’ that detailed the ‘halacha’ when it came time to decide if we could ‘bench’ separately or not (ignore the sentence if you missed those words). I hung around with the jew-crew for a few hours, then sleep. Peaceful sleep.
Friday/Shabbat – Day 178/179
January 29, 2013
Friday with no classes was a treat. However, that’s not to say I was unoccupied! First thing in the morning I had a meeting with the lovely Miss Amy Miller, my academic adviser. She helped me out a great deal in trying to figure out what I was doing and where I was going and aside from that provided me a bit of an insider view into quite how Penn worked.
The rest of the afternoon was spent meeting with Professors and working on various things, a long lunch at Hillel and then TA training and our meeting. In addition to all that I managed to squeeze in the time to make a salad for a shabbat dinner I was hosting with two friends, Michal and Ben. My only issue was a lack of invited guests. Luckily enough, lunch at Hillel provided me with the opportunity to invite a new friend, Safi Aharoni to dinner.
Friday night came and service was pretty lovely. It was good to be able to unload at the end of the week and just chill! Dinner however was absolutely wonderful. The conversation was spirited, the food excellent and this made for an overall great experience. The next day I attended the ‘sleep service’ till around midday and from there went to lunch at Aviva’s and Michal’s room. This was again a fantastic meal and made this Shabbat one of my favourites since leaving the country. I then hung around with Aviva till late afternoon when we all headed back to Hillel for a few activities before the end of Shabbat.
Following Shabbat, I raced back to my room, procrastinated for a while and, then got on to some work for the rest of the night.